Time Travel Methods: Queering Time and Space in Critical Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational Methodological Configurations

Abstract

This paper presents time travel as research method into the counterhistories, counterfuturities, and counterfactuals of educational environments. Two coequal resources are used to build this (provisional) approach to method: poststructural philosophy and a queer theory insistence on low theory, or pop culture, as research text. Time travel’s empirical site here is productivity logic within Finnish higher education. A normative approach to time and space promotes passive acceptance of productivity logic in the present and future – alternatives exist in the past but that is gone, and productivity logic is so dominant that it is hard to conceive of a future not also made in its image. Time travel is an affirmative method in the face of normative time captured by productivity.

Author

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, University of Nevada, Reno